The Life and Times of Jeff Squyres

February 2003 Archives

February 7, 2003

I just paid an assload of money to join that Ted Chambers gym.

It was warm enough the other that my car's turn signal started to automatically turn itself off after a turn again.

Yes, you read that right. When it's cold, my car decides to leave the turn signal on, even after I have completed the turn. It's like my car is whining that it's too cold to be driving around. "Why are you driving? Shouldn't all right-thinking people be in nice, warm houses? [click] I'm just going to annoy you by leaving the turn [click] signal on, and perhaps in [click] frustration, you'll retreat back home. [click] [click] [click]" Unfortunately, this has as much effect as deer thinking, "If I don't move, they can't see me." So I treat it like passive activism. My car is the Ghandi of Honda Civics.

I forgot to say that we finally managed to get LAM 6.5.9 out the door.

Louisville has gotten a fair amount of snow this winter. It snowed again last night, making the roads a total mess. Andy tells me that the roads were a mess yesterday between Bloomies and Indianapolis, too. That doesn't help, since I have to run some errands today. Bonk!

I was contacted the other day from a guy at Phillips research about my parallel Ogg encoder. After a little discussion, I have him a copy of my code and he might actually make a GPL multi-threaded Ogg encoder. How cool would that be?

February 13, 2003

Guess how many pieces of gum Beth chewed last year?

After an uptime of almost 72 days, I think I need to reboot my desktop machine.

The sound is totally hosed -- xmms simply barfs when I try to launch it. And vmware sessions have been running inordinately slow lately. Well, I guess that this is what I get for running a pre-production Linux kernel. :-)

Some quickies:

Jeremiah and I will be getting a new release of OOMPI out the door in the near future.

Tivo is now capturing Who's Line for me, which makes me happy :-)

I'm ashamed to admit that I got sucked into Joe Millionaire (it was Eileen's fault!) -- my first (and hopefully only) reality TV show. It's sooooo horrible, yet I can't stop watching. It's like a train wreck. Literally. There's only one decent woman on the show (all the rest were catty and horrible in one way or another), and I have a bad feeling that he's not going to choose her next week (the final episode). :-(

I reported a bug in the GNU Automake project, and it's officially fixed in the upcoming release (v1.7.2). I'm now listed in the THANKS file.

Oompa-Loompa's didn't wear shoes.

The SMP algorithms in LAM are going very well. After about 8 different implementations, I finally found a nice, elegant way to do it. I should be able to make much more progress on them this upcoming weekend. The performance increase for MPI_BARRIER alone is staggering -- it's awesome, baby!

February 14, 2003

Ahhh.... Nothing like that tiny new car smell

Arrggh!!

My last entry ended with how I was going to reboot my desktop because things were acting flaky. Well, I rebooted, and that's when the Badness started.

Things were now extraordinarily slow. And I could no longer see most of the network. That is, after looooong delays, I could see [some] things on my local network. But I couldn't get outside of my network at all. ifconfig showed lots of errors on the NIC.

So this started me on a huge search to see if I had somehow fried my NIC. I tried 4 different Linux kernels (each of which takes a while to comple, especially the modules), tried twiddling the parameters to my NIC, etc. This morning, I swapped out the NIC for a spare that I had lying around. No love. Great. Why didn't I do that last night?

So it's definitely a software problem. Then I looked closer at the default route.

It was wrong, by one digit.

When I replaced my DSL router/WAP, it came with a different default address than my old one, and I must have just manually changed the route last time and forgot to change the boot up default route. Arrggghh!!

After thinking about it, that totally explains the slowness -- Linux thought that networking was up, but instead of having all of its packets rejected by some remote server, since the incorrect router IP that I had in there did not exist, all packets would just get silently dropped. So the slowness was probably due to timeouts to all kinds of processes failing. I've seen network failures before, of course, but not like this -- usually it's pretty obvious when your default route is wrong because someone rejects the packets, and you get immediate denials. But I unfortunately picked on that didn't exist, and that led to timeouts, not denials.

Great. I wasted about 8 hours on this. Well, I'll remember this the next time it happens. Wisdom is not simply knowledge, it's knowledge + experience.

On the up side, I got an e-mail from the MoveableType folks (the blog-makers), and there's a new version out. There's a bunch of new features, one of which is the ability to have a plugin that has a lot of the features that I had back in the original JeffJournal (particularly with respect to entering in text that magically turns into HTML -- stuff like *hello* being automatically turned into hello). I've really missed those features, so I might try upgrading sometime soon...

February 16, 2003

It's got butter on the table, right there between Butter James and Butter Peter... an almost mind-blowing vortex of art and material...

Doncha hate it when you go to wind the grandfather clock, only to find that the hour hand is over one of the winding sockets? That means that you have to remember to come back at least 30 minutes later (but possibly not 2 hours later -- when it could be covering the next socket).

February 17, 2003

Happiness!

Yay! Joe Millionaire picked the good one!!

Go Zora!

I admitted a few entries ago that Joe Millionaire was the first (and hopefully last) reality TV show that I have ever watched. So while the whole premise of the show is totally fake, and "reality" TV shows are anything but, these two people at least seemed to be genuinely nice people. Ok, yes, they both seemed a bit naieve, but... aw, hell, I don't want to analyze this to death. They seemed like good people. More power to them. I hope they actually make it work.